388 - Can You Actually Trust Your Email Marketing Numbers?

Speaker A: $6,000 in Klaviyo, $600 in Google Analytics. Same campaign, same week. These are real numbers from a real Klaviyo account that I took over. And if you've ever stared at two reports that should say the same thing and thought to yourself, is someone lying to me? This episode is for you. Nobody is lying. But what's actually happening is something every, every e commerce business owner sending marketing emails needs to understand. I'm Larissa Wurstieck and for a decade with my agency Joy Joya, uh, I've been helping women focused product based e commerce brands grow with more intention, creativity and clarity. We ditch the marketing formulas that don't feel like you and build strategies that actually connect. Let's talk about one of the most stressful moments in email marketing. Opening two reports about the same campaign and seeing two completely different numbers. I want to use a real example from an account that my team recently took over. One campaign went out to about 9,500 subscribers. It had really solid performance, almost 49% open rate, 220 clicks. But Klaviyo reported six 62 orders and just over $6,000 in revenue. When I pulled up Google Analytics for the exact same campaign, it said 212 sessions and $624 attributed the same email. One tool said 6 grand, the other said 600. If you were the business owner looking at these two numbers, you'd be asking a very reasonable question. Is my agency lying to me? Are they inflating results? Is something broken? Who am I supposed to trust? When Klaviyo says a campaign made $6,000 and Google Analytics says 600? I want to assure you that nothing is necessarily broken. Those two tools are answering two completely different questions. Klaviyo is asking how much did the people who engaged with this email go on to buy? While Google Analytics is asking how much was purchased in the single visit that started from clicking the email, they're answering different questions. And so there are different answers. Neither one is wrong. The first thing I did when I saw this gap, because I was kind of horrified too, was check one specific thing. And that immediately told me whether we had a real problem or just an attribution difference. Before you go on to panic about revenue, look at clicks and how they compare to sessions. So in the example that I gave, Klaviyo said that 220 people clicked. Google Analytics said that 212 sessions came from the email. That's basically a perfect match. And that's your proof that nothing is broken. A click should become A session on the website. And when those two are lining up, that means the tracking is healthy and working correctly. If they're wildly off, like you're seeing 200 clicks and then only 20 sessions in your Google Analytics or Shopify, that's a tagging or tracking problem. But when you see a revenue difference like the shocking one that I mentioned, that's just marketing attribution. So the pipes or the foundation was working correctly. It was working as expected. There was no mistake. It just came down to how each tool decides who gets credit for the sale. And those two tools, Plaviyo and Google Analytics in my example, have different philosophies about that. Google Analytics is the stricter of the two in some regard. It only gives the email credit if someone clicks that email and buys within the same session. Meaning if they leave and then come back through a different channel like Google Search, or through social media, or by typing your URL directly, that new session that the person has started will get the credit in Google Analytics instead of your email getting the credit. Even if the email was the first thing they clicked. This is the most conservative way to count, which is why it's almost always your smallest revenue number that's being attributed to each channel. I mean, think about real buying behavior, even your own. You see something you like, you, you click, you browse, maybe you add to cart, and then life happens. You get distracted, you close the laptop, 30 minutes go by. Google Analytics doesn't count that as an email sale. Even though email is what started the whole thing. That's not an error, that's just how it's designed. Klaviyo on the other hand, is more generous in some regards. However, you do have a way to control these settings and, and reconcile them as well. So when I looked at the settings on this example account that I had mentioned earlier, I could see exactly why the gap was so large. Before I get into what I found in those settings, a, uh, quick break to tell you about joyjoya. We partner with women focused e commerce brands to turn their email and SMS channels into true growth engines. Our clients typically see a 30 to 40% lift in revenue within the first 90 days. Visit joyjoya.com to see what we can do for you. So when I went into the Klaviyo attribution settings on this account that we just took over, both the open based and the click based attribution were turned on. I think it's important for everyone with a Klaviyo account to know this. That's actually the default and most accounts are set up this way and nobody ever changes it. But it does have a massive impact on the attributed revenue that you're going to see in Klaviyo. So go into your own Klaviyo attribution settings and look at your conversion window. For most brands it says something like opened five days, clicked five days. That first part opens means that Klaviyo will credit a campaign for a sale if someone opened the email and then bought within five days through any channel on any device. Not clicks, meaning they click through to the website or the product page. But that setting will track people who opened and then eventually bought within five days. And that one setting accounts for a huge chunk of the gap between what Klaviyo shows and and what Google Analytics shows. So in that account that I mentioned, the campaign got 220 clicks, but at a 49% open rate on 9,500 people, it roughly got 4,600 opens. Google Analytics can only effectively see or track the 200ish people who actually clicked through. Klaviyo. With open attribution on is potentially crediting purchases from a pool of 4,600. And that's why we don't just have slightly different numbers, but we actually have revenue from two very different groups of people. One that is a much larger group than what Google Analytics is tracking. There's also something worth knowing about those opens. Some of them may not be real. Apple Mail privacy protection automatically preloads emails on behalf of Apple Mail users, whether or not a human ever looked at it. So there are settings to fix this. But potentially in your account, if you're seeing such a big discrepancy, some of what Klaviyo counts as an open could actually be a machine that's just firing in the background. Most accounts have never changed or looked at the settings to modify or exclude these things. And it's really worth checking, especially if you're worried about where all these discrepancies are happening. So when I saw that 10 to 1 gap in this account, it made complete sense. Both open and click attribution were on. The conversion window was five days and and the brand had a high open rate. Of course Klaviyo was crediting thousands of potential buyers. And of course Google Analytics only saw the few hundred who clicked and bought right away. So that brings me to the question you may be asking if you've been following along, should you switch to clicks only attribution in Klaviyo, it's a reasonable thing to consider. Click Only attribution in Klaviyo gives you that more conservative and I guess more defensible. Number one, that's going to be closer to what Google Analytics and what Shopify is going to credit email for. And when it's clicks only, it's harder to argue with. In a business analytics conversation you can clearly kind of reconcile all the data. But there is a caveat here. Someone who opens your email on their phone during lunch and then buys on their laptop that night Klaviyo. When you only have click attribution, it might miss that and not give the email credit. So clicks only isn't perfect either. It's more accurate in some ways and less accurate in others. The important thing is understanding what your setting actually means when so that you can speak to and understand any discrepancies in the numbers with confidence. Reconciling Klaviyo and Google Analytics doesn't mean making the two numbers equal, because honestly, even if you go the clicks route in Klaviyo, they're never going to be equal. Attribution is just really complicated. It means instead being able to explain or see see the gap? Google Analytics credits the email for purchases that happened in the same click session. Klaviyo credits more orders potentially because it includes everyone who opened or click and then bought within five days through any path. When you can say that out loud and it's true, you're reconciled the gap then stops being scary and making you feel paranoid because you feel like someone's lying to you. No, instead it starts being expected. And again, you can understand why there are differences. And if the numbers genuinely have to tie out like a finance conversation rather than a marketing one. Here's what I would tell you then. Neither tool is your source of truth. Your Shopify store is it's the only place that every order exists exactly once. Every other tool Klaviyo, Google Analytics, SMS meta ads, TikTok ads, any other ads you're running or any other way you are driving people to buy on your website is running its own attribution model and they will all happily claim that they they were responsible for the sale. If you add up email revenue plus SMS revenue plus paid social revenue plus SEO plus whatever else across all your tools, you're probably going to get a number that's way higher than your actual revenue because the same purchase got counted a few different times when it has to be real. Just try to reconcile everything against your store rather than trying to pit one tool against the other and trying to figure out which one is lying. The reason this matters goes way beyond data hygiene. If you don't understand why your numbers differ, you might talk yourself out of a campaign that actually worked just because Google Analytics made it seem smaller than the impact it actually had. Or you may over promise on email's impact because Klaviyo made it look enormous. Knowing what each number includes is what lets you make a real decision instead of a nervous one. And if you are working with an agency, this is what lets you ask the right questions instead of wondering if the numbers they present you every month are too good to be true. So it does help you have better relationships with agency partners, with your team members, your employees, freelancers, et cetera. It's really good to know how marketing attribution works for your e commerce business. And that's it for today's episode. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe and leave a review. It helps others find the show. And remember, if you want to grow your e commerce brand with email and SMS that actually drive sales, visit joyjoya.com to see how we can help.